Salesman Pitches New Product: Autobiography

January 17, 1996|By ROY RIVENBURG Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES - — This article is not available in stores! For a limited time only, you can own one of the most amazing works in journalism history! It illuminates! It entertains! It washes and waxes your car!

It also tells the strange saga of TV pitchman Ron Popeil, a tale involving murder plots, multiple wives and a diet of chicken feet.

For four decades, Popeil has sliced, diced and Mr. Microphoned his way across American TV screens. He has unleashed such products as the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, Hula Ho (the weeder with a wiggle) and GLH spray-on hair.

He has endured such attention as spoofs by Saturday Night Live and a plunge into bankruptcy.

And now, at age 60, he's back. This time he's peddling a new invention: his autobiography.

To Popeil, The Salesman of the Century (Delacorte Press) is an American success story - the account of a college dropout who overcame adversity and sold (so far) more than $1 billion in goods.

But it's also a fairy tale gone awry. Between the lines is the story of an affection-starved youth who discovered that the only way he could relate to people was by selling them stuff.

Popeil's Beverly Hills home is guarded by an electronic gate, security cameras and a dog named Pasta. This is the heart of Popeil's infomercial empire, Ronco Inc. Here, products are tested and TV spots taped.

The house is also something of a shrine to his merchandise. An Inside the Shell Egg Scrambler rests on a kitchen counter. A redesigned Pocket Fisherman is draped across a table. And two Automatic Pasta Makers squat near a smoke-belching mystery device that seems destined to go back to the drawing board.

In the middle of it all, lounging on the couch, is the guru of gadgets himself, Ronald Martin Popeil.

Speaking in his trademark hypnotic voice, the one that causes credit cards to twitch in their owners' wallets, the Bronx-born hawker reminisces about his achievements.

"I think I've fulfilled the American Dream," he declares.

And it's hard not to believe him at first: A personal fortune in "the double-digit millions."A 28-year-old model as his new bride. Homes in Las Vegas and Southern California.

But behind the glamour is a painful past.

Popeil wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth - or even a Ginsu knife.

At age 3, his parents divorced and essentially abandoned him. Exiled to an Upstate New York boarding school, he didn't see them for years.

When he was about 8, his paternal grandparents took him in, but life remained miserable, he says. The old couple fought constantly, served meals made from chicken feet and showed Popeil little affection.

It wasn't until they moved from Miami to Chicago - where his father manufactured kitchenware - that Popeil found salvation. There, he stumbled upon Maxwell Street, the gritty equivalent of a modern-day flea market. At 16, he joined the rough-and-tumble collection of street vendors and thieves who unloaded merchandise there.

"I pushed. I yelled. I hawked," he recalls. "And it worked."

But there was more to Maxwell Street than money. "I had lived for 16 years in homes without love," he writes. "Now I had finally found a form of affection, and a human connection, through sales."

Popeil claims he cleared $1,000 a week, a gold mine by 1950s standards.

Then he discovered late-night television. And thus began a parade of products still seared into public consciousness: Chop-O-Matics and Dial-O-Matics.

Feather Touch Knives and Food Dehydrators.

And Kitchen Magician and canned hair By the early 1970s, Ronco was cruising up the American Stock Exchange. And Popeil was a jet-setting millionaire.

But his family life was a wreck.

In 1974, Popeil's stepmother, Eloise, was convicted of trying to have Popeil's father murdered.

Then, after she served a 19-month sentence, the elder Popeil remarried her.

Ron's domestic situation wasn't notably better. His obsession with work took a toll.

Popeil admits that he's been a lousy husband and mediocre dad, but says he's trying to break the pattern with his youngest daughter, Lauren, 12 (his two other children are adults).

But during a November visit to Los Angeles, Popeil concedes he hasn't seen Lauren in 11/2 months.

In 1984, Ronco began a new chapter - Chapter 11.

Popeil played the national anthem and signed off the air.

In the early '90s, Popeil launched his television comeback, blitzing cable stations with infomercials for electric food dehydrators, pasta makers and aerosol hair.